Our journal editors are looking for a tighter publishing workflow, and would like to send out automatic reminder emails to authors whose article required revisions. So far, the only documentation for reminder emails I could find, concerned reminders to reviewers, but we’d like to send reminder emails to authors who haven’t yet submitted a revised version, at different times:
2 weeks before the deadline
the week before the deadline
on the deadline date
after the deadline has passed
Is this possible at all in OJS? If not, we can’t be the only journal with such requests; how are others doing this?
I’m not aware of anyone doing this yet, so it would need some PHP experience in order to implement. You could start by having a look at the review reminder task in classes/tasks/ReviewReminder.inc.php.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team
A late thanks for the pointer! I’m afraid I don’t have the PHP skills myself, but it’s good to know where to start looking at least. Still, I’m afraid that the crux is that reviews have a due submission date in the OJS “data model” (if I’m not misusing terms), while this is missing for articles. Hence, I can imagine it would require more work to create a similar concept for articles, in order to hook scheduled actions to it.
Re-reading this thread I realize I had been silent about the OJS version: I was referring to version 2.4.8. Meanwhile, OJS-3.0 has landed; has this feature ((automatic) reminder emails to authors) been added to its revised workflow?
OJS 3.0 isn’t different from 2.4.x in this regard. One approach that might be possible without any data model changes required: just check the date of the “revisions required” decision, and compare it against the latest author revision. If the decision is more than e.g. two weeks old, and no revision has been uploaded, send a reminder (and record a flag on the article indicating that a reminder has already been sent, to prevent this from happening repeatedly).
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team
A couple of journals have asked about this feature, so I will probably try to solve it with a plugin. I will post about the results to this thread. If you have plans of implementing this to the core, let me know.
I don’t have concrete plans to implement it here, but it does seem like it might be a useful feature. I’d be happy to review code for possible inclusion in the distribution.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team
I have to take a better look at this. Are you thinking that this would be in the core or that the plugin would be included in the distribution?
I was already thinking about a plugin where you would define the amount of weeks in the plugin settings and once enabled it would compare the dates you mentioned in your post.
However, if this would be in the core, then we would probably need a classes/tasks/RevisionReminder.inc.php and changes in the database. But I have not thought about this option yet.
I was thinking it would be fine to implement in the core, since the reviewer plugins are already written that way, and since it would probably be something the user community would generally find useful.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team
I know that this is an old thread, but just wondering if anything came of this conversation? We will be looking to upgrade to OJS 3 in the coming months, and the lack of author deadlines (along with auto chase emails based on that deadline) is something that editors have constantly asked for us to implement in our current OJS 2 platform. I can’t find notes to say that it has been added, but thought I’d check.
Just some basic plans at the moment: [OJS] Revision reminders · Issue #2687 · pkp/pkp-lib · GitHub
I was very busy with other OJS related things during last spring so managed to get that issue there only in August. PKP has been so busy with finishing 3.1 during the last couple of months so I decided to wait with that feature till the release and continue bugging @asmecher with questions after that.
We have the same issue (lack of author deadlines) as @TimW, for OJS 3.0.2. It would be truly helpful if we had that option.
Some authors take too much time making the changes asked in the reviews, and we waste precious time trying to keep track of those who already did send the updated version of the article and those who did not.
Do you have any idea about when can that feature be available? Maybe in OJS 3.2 or so? Or is it too soon yet?
Hi - thanks for the update, that looks like a great start. If the below
helps, we’re thinking along the below:
journal has a default ‘revisions due’ date, (e.g. 4 weeks), that is set
in the Setup pages
editor can then change this prior to sending the revision request
editor can also change this post request, should the author ask for an
extension
Settings then have an auto email that goes out on X day past the logged
deadline and again X days past the deadline (so there are 2 auto chase
emails, with separate email templates)
editor then also has the option to chase them manually
I’ll feedback if we do progress with this from our side.
Well, I don’t think it has a release date yet (according to Milestones - pkp/pkp-lib · GitHub), and that’s why I mentioned that same version - I suppose it still has room for more features to be added
Even so, thank you for the update. By the way, do you know who could be handling this right now? Or is everyone still focusing solely on version 3.1?
[Context : OJS 3.1.2-4] I would just like to reiterate here the fact that this feature (i.e. automatic emails reminder to authors) has been requested by several of our journals and would be very useful. Thank you for you consideration.
